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Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Why Weingarten Got Arrested

This week,
Valarie Strauss (Answer Sheet) interviewed American Federation of Teachers
boss Randi Weingarten about why she went to Philadelphia and got arrested.
Weingarten correctly noted that the people of Philadelphia, who had asked for a
one-year moratorium on school closures, have been repeatedly ignored by the
mayor. She also correctly pointed out that the push to close the schools is
largely the initiative of the mayor, governor, the city’s School Reform
Commission (SRC) and an outside consulting firm, Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
“When the powers that be ignore you, and dismiss you,” she told Strauss, “then
you have no other choice than to resort to civil disobedience to confront an
immoral act.”

What
Weingarten did not say was why they want to close dozens of schools (i.e., open
up space for private charter schools to set up shop) or whether she was
planning on engaging in ongoing civil disobedience to achieve her goals. The
fact is that a single arrest at one high profile public meeting is nothing more
than a publicity stunt. It is not an organized or effective strategy for
reversing a large-scale public giveaway to private business.

One
justification for the closures is the school district’s perennial budget
problems. Yet the district voted to spend $1.4 million to hire BCG, according
to Workers World. BCG Partner Sanjeev Midha is a
trustee for KIPP Philadelphia (an online charter school). Not surprisingly, BCG
promotes online education. Other BCG alumni include Mitt Romney, Benjamin
Netanyahu, hedge fund manager John Paulson, and GE CEO Jeff Immelt. SRC members
include Feather Houstoun, a former president of the William Penn Foundation
(which donated additional money to hire BCG) and Pedro Ramos, who currently
sits on the board of the United Way (which also coughed up funds to hire BCG).

If the
school closures go through, the district will lose dozens union jobs.
According, to National Educators Association president Dennis Van Roekel, the NEA, alone, has lost 150,000
unionized teaching jobs over the last three years. The AFT has no doubt lost
thousands, as well. If Weingarten wants to save her own job (and her more than $600,000 per year
income) she needs to
maintain membership levels, not let them shrink further. However, to do this
requires mobilizing Philadelphia’s teachers, who are affiliated with the AFT,
to do far more than protest at school board meetings. They need to engage in
concerted and ongoing job actions and
civil disobedience, something neither Weingarten nor any other major union
leader wants to do.

The paradox
is that while union bosses depend on their members’ dues to pay their salaries,
they depend on the good graces of the ruling elite to exist at all, graces that
have been granted to them in exchange for keeping the system running smoothly.
The quid pro quo is that if they keep
their members quiescent and on the job, the unions are tolerated and minor
concessions are sometimes granted them. The bosses will even tolerate the
occasional angry rant, arrest or otherwise uncivilized act by union leaders if
it helps them to keep the rabble in line. Consequently, union leaders have been
relying more and more on legal and political action than on strikes and other
job actions, a strategy that has, at best, merely kept the decline in union
membership from occurring any faster than it has.

Weingarten described her action in Philadelphia as a strong “statement” that
the mayor, governor and SRC are not on the side of the people. In other words,
the school closures are an attack on democracy, which is a politically popular
concept, but not one that is likely to save teachers’ jobs. If the problem is merely
the product of bad politics, as she has implied, then the solution is supposedly
to fight back in the political arena, thus squelching any movement for
workplace actions.

Ultimately, Weingarten's got arrested because she needed to look tough to her constituents. It was a relatively painless and cheap way to win points among parents and teachers, but not an effective strategy for ending the school closures or saving union jobs.

1 comment:

Hi Michael.. I just came across your blog today... Not sure how I got here, but somebody linked to one of your posts.

I'm firmly, very firmly against anybody making profits off of school children, particularly if those profits come from public moneys. I've taught in both public schools (many years ago) and private non-profit non-religious schools (about ten-twenty years ago). I could go on and on about my experiences teaching in these two different kinds of educational establishments, but I just want to reiterate my firm aversion to and my deep concern about for-profit and charter schools.